by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

DAVOS, Switzerland -- The top climate official at the United Nations has described her role in pushing nations to contain the Earth's climate as a "sacred" job.

"We are truly defining the quality of life for our children," Christina Figueres, the U.N.'s executive secretary for climate, told USA TODAY on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We have to do everything we can because there is no plan B because there is no planet B," she said.

"I fully intend my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to live on this planet. This job is a sacred responsibility," Figueres said.

Figueres' comments to USA TODAY come as assembled leaders in the Swiss ski resort are being urged by environmentalists to invest more extensively in cleaner energy sources, which they say are needed to avoid pernicious effects of climate change.

"Cumulatively we have already invested over a trillion dollars into renewable energies such as solar and wind but that is still far from where we need to get. We need to be investing a trillion every year," Figueres said.

But many nations have been curtailing their use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels, primarily because of the cost. Renewable energy is far more expensive that conventional energy sources such as oil, coal and natural gas, and thus require substantial subsidies from taxpayers to be economically viable.

Germany and other European nations have announced recently significant reductions in government subsidies for wind and other renewable energy sources. For 2013, renewable energy investments fell 12% to $254 billion after falling 9% the year prior, according to research by Bloomberg's New Energy Finance unit.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are pushing for a long-sought, binding international treaty in Paris in 2015 that would mandate that all nations reduce carbon emissions from coal and oil. A WEF report last week said that failing to act on the threat of global warming is one of the gravest threats facing the world over the next 11 months.

"It is important that we get the treaty because the signal to the markets, the signal to the global economy, needs to be stronger than it is now," Figueres told the Associated Press in an interview in Davos on Wednesday.

Figueres says failure to prevent a warming of the globe would be a catastrophe. But there is evidence that the globe is not be warming as predicted that is providing skeptics of man-made global warming theory with ammunition.

Recent data shows that since 1998 the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere has not gone up or down. Computer models cited by U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that global mean temperatures would rise significantly as levels of carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

Such emissions have in fact hit record highs in recent years, due in large part to the growth of industry in China and India. But still there has been no statistically significant increase in global average surface temperatures in about 16 years.

In the century prior to the pause, the IPCC says atmospheric temperatures rose about 1.5 degrees F. Scientists for the IPCC said earlier this month that their computer models predict the recent standstill is temporary and temperatures will go up.

Costa Rican-born Figueres, 57, says she will be pushing for a global agreement to stabilize possible warming at a level of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). She said at a renewable energy investment conference last week in New York that "climate change deniers" were of no real concern.

Figueres acknowledged that the U.S. is on track to meet its target of reducing international carbon emissions by 17% on 2005 levels by 2020. But she said that "even if the U.S. had the most squeaky-clean policy on this they can't solve it all by themselves.

"From the perspective of science one cannot be happy with any country. Certainly there is no country that is aligning itself with the urgency of the science," she said.